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Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy ReviewI've been involved with higher education for many, many years. Through my undergraduate years at a prestigious private university, graduate school at a large public university, and several teaching jobs at small liberal arts colleges I've been exposed to almost all aspects of this sector of the economy. Over this time I've become increasingly disillusioned with the overall ability of the higher educational institutions to provide meaningful, effective, and affordable education. American colleges and universities are still the best ones in the world by most objective criteria, but their outmoded and recalcitrant adherence to the model of education where the prestige of an institution is more valuable than its ability to educate the students will eventually catch up with them. Most colleges and universities are engaged in a heedless arms race with each other, oftentimes over criteria that don't have any direct t impact on student education. All of this would not be such a big issue were it not for an exponential growth in the price of tuition and accommodations at such institutions. Students and Taxpayers are increasingly asked for a larger and larger contribution to the overall bill. Unfortunately, this straddles individuals, states, and the federal government with unreasonably high expenditures that are part of the growing debt problem. The current system of higher education is unsustainable in a long run, and in Change.edu Andrew Rosen tries to give a few suggestions for the solution to this mounting problem.
Andrew Rosen is chairman and CEO of Kaplan. He himself is a product of elite higher education, but as someone who has now worked in "for-profit" educational environment for many years he has picked up many valuable insights about the nature and structure of this form of education. In this short book he aims to share some of those insights, and educate the public about the true way that universities and colleges operate. In the process he manages to dispel many myths and misconceptions.
Rosen provides us with multiple examples of different approaches to higher education: large state university, ostentatiously affluent private colleges, large community colleges, and "for-profit" colleges and educational centers. All of these institutions have their strengths and weaknesses. However, it's the increasingly unmanageable expenditures of the "non-profit" institutions that are creating a lot of long-term problems for those institutions, as well as for millions college graduates. The indebtedness of an average college grad has reached staggering proportions, and it's becoming increasingly less clear that the money that has been spent on the more traditional college education provides an unequivocally higher value.
The book contains several examples of college profligacy that would be funny were they not so shocking. One of the more ridiculous ones is the "climbing wall arms race" that many colleges have engaged in. The distinction of having the tallest climbing wall may be a great way to attract prospective new students, but it's as far removed from the core mission of a university as they come.
One big issue that I have with this book is that it hardly mentions one major source of increasing expenses and inefficiency in higher education: the administrative bloat. Over the past half a century the percentage of full-time faculty on most universities and colleges has increased by a rather small margin, while the number of administrators has ballooned by an order of magnitude. Many of the new administrative positions have been created in order to deal with the ever-expanding facilities and resources, but a substantial number are tied to "non-physical" programs and activities. This is a part of the increasing involvement of modern academic institutions into various causes and political activism that goes well beyond the traditional educational agenda of such institutions. Unfortunately, many students are given a false impression that such activism is a suitable replacement for the rigorous academic work, and the value that they get out of college is further diminished. In many colleges and universities one gets an impression that the focal point of these institutions is in fact the administration, and the rest of the school is there to serve administration's goals and visions.
At one point in this book Rosen engages in a thought experiment where he tries to envision what will higher education look like in 25 years, at the 400th anniversary of Harvard University. He believes that not much will change for the very top US colleges, but there will be much more diversification on the lower levels of academic hierarchy. He is probably in principle right about this, although I have a suspicion that the technological and societal developments over the course of the next quarter of the century will be so radically different from almost anything that we can imagine that any long-term prognostication is likely to be way off. Nonetheless, this is a very useful way of trying to envision what would be the best direction for the higher education, and Rosen deserves a lot of credit for making us think along those lines.
The revolution in higher education is way overdue, and it's likely that it will happen sooner rather than later. This book is a very informative and useful guide for thinking about these topics, and it provides the reader with ample material on which to build his or her own conclusions.
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